Carole Lombard was an American actress. She is particularly noted for her roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s.

She is listed as one of the American Film Institute's greatest stars of all time and was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s, earning around US$500,000 per year (more than five times the salary of the US President).

She received one Academy Award for Best Actress nomination for 'My Man Godfrey' (1936).

Lombard's career was cut short when she died at the age of 33 in a plane crash while returning from a World War II Bond tour. Her mother Bess Peters and Clarke Gable's press agent, Irwin Winkler, were also killed in the accident.

Lombard's final film "To Be or Not to Be" (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch and co-starring Jack Benny, a satire about Nazism and World War II, was in post-production at the time of her death. When the film was released, it received mixed reviews, particularly about its controversial content, but Lombard's performance was hailed as the perfect send off to one of 1930s Hollywood's most important stars.

In 1944 the US Government commissioned a new Liberty ship to be named after the late film star. Gable attended the launch of the SS Carole Lombard on January 15 1944, the two-year anniversary of Lombard's record breaking war bond drive. The ship was involved in rescuing hundreds of survivors from sunken ships in the Pacific and returning them to safety.

Despite being married twice more, Gable chose to be interred beside Lombard in Forest Lawn Memorial Park when he died in 1960.